Do You Get It?

One of the reasons people loved to listen to Jesus was that he talked about things they knew about, scenes and events from their everyday lives. But the lives of the people Jesus talked to can seem very far away from our own, sometimes. His illustrations don’t always mean that much to us.

What’s a Pharisee to you? To me? Have you ever seen a Pharisee? Does the word make you remember that time last week when you had a run-in with a Pharisee, so that when you hear the story you can immediately identify with what Jesus is about to say? Probably not.

And what about yeast? Do you bake bread? I do, so yeast is familiar to me. You buy it at the store in sets of three little packets, Fleischman’s or Red Star, which you can store on the shelf for months. When you want to bake bread you just open the packet and add warm water, and presto! the bread rises. We all know about yeast, right? Wrong. The yeast the people of Palestine used is more like sourdough. How many of you have ever made sourdough bread? It’s a lot harder to use, and a lot harder to take care of. It’s a culture made of fermenting grain that most people nowadays keep in the refrigerator, because when it spoils it’s really foul. I have no idea how the people in Jesus’ day kept their yeast safe. In the Bible it’s used as a symbol of corruption because just a little of it can spread so far.

But if the details of people’s lives have changed a lot from Jesus’ day to this, the people themselves have not. We’re just the same kinds of folks they were back then. And we have the same kinds of problems, and the same sorts of faults, and we need to hear exactly the same lessons. So what we’re going to do is move Jesus and his disciples forward 2,000 years, to a Bible study over at the U.

It’s an open-air Bible study; they moved outside because it’s one of those rare Minnesota spring afternoons between blizzard and mosquito time. Jesus is on a roll, the kids are really connecting with what he has to say, and a lot of new people have gathered, to find out what’s going on, and stayed to listen. After a while, a couple of hecklers decide to start giving Jesus a hard time. “Why should we follow you instead of Buddha?” one calls. “Yeah,” says another, “or Mohammed.” A third voice chimes in, “My spirit guide says all ways lead to God if you’re sincere.” The mood of the crowd begins to change. A girl in the front row says, “That’s right; what matters is if it’s true for you.” The first student pushes to the front and says again, more insistently, “Why should we listen to you? Can you prove you’re right?”

Jesus looks at him silently for a moment, then shakes his head. “I won’t waste my breath,” he said. And to his disciples, “We’re done here for today. Pack up your stuff.”

In the van, on their way down to Red Wing, Jesus says, “Be careful of getting infected by those scoffers.”

And the disciples begin to discuss among themselves what Jesus meant. “They didn’t look sick to me,” says one. “Do you suppose he meant AIDS?” asks another. “I don’t think so,” disagrees a third, “Jesus knows we don’t do drugs or sleep around.” “Maybe he means the flu,” says the first. “There’s been a lot of that going around this year, and we’ve got too much to do; we can’t afford to get sick.” “Maybe we should go in for flu shots,” suggests another.

Jesus listened to all of this and said, “Why are you talking about getting sick? Don’t you get it? Weren’t you listening? Does everything that goes on around you just go in one ear and out the other? Have you gotten sick once since you’ve been with me?”

“No, we haven’t,” admits one.

“And do you remember last week, when that woman brought me her baby with the ear infection, what happened?”

“You touched her ear and she stopped screaming,” said the one who had suggested flu shots.

“And you still think I’m worried about your getting sick?” Jesus shakes his head. “When are you guys ever going to get it?”

They missed the point, didn’t they? Jesus’ disciples missed the main point entirely. Why?

Three things got in the way of their getting the message.

First, they were easily distracted. Second, they focused on the superficial. And third, they forgot about what Jesus had already done.

Let’s go back two thousand years, and look again at Mark’s account. What had the disciples been doing? They had been accompanying Jesus, learning from him, watching people flock to him by the hundreds and thousands, and had just witnessed an argument between their leader and some of the chief opinion-makers of their day. You’d think they’d be interested in what had just happened. This was significant. The Pharisees were really important. They were the religious big-wigs, the scholars and teachers and writers; they were THE authorities on Scripture and sin and God how to be a good Jew. And yet Jesus brushed them off. Jesus not only brushed them off, he insulted them. You’d think the disciples would notice. And yet when Jesus gives them a warning, the disciples latch onto probably the least important word in the whole sentence and go haring off on a metaphorical wild-goose chase. Jesus mentions yeast and they start thinking about dinner.